Suggestions is our weekly column of weird tales, implausible promoting claims, complicated directions and extra
6 October 2021
Josie Ford
It’s Behind The Milk!
Suggestions is *at all times* favourably inclined in the direction of anybody who says by the use of introduction that they’re “a very long time subscriber who *at all times* reads NS from again to entrance”. So we’re smiling beneficently at Cathrine Lowther as she attracts our consideration to an unfamiliar paper from the medical literature.
“Admittedly, it’s 16 years previous,” she says. Pricey Cathrine, our intensive piling system has a murky dust-ridden layer in the direction of its backside that some archaeologists affiliate with the sacking of London by Boudicca. The paper in query, by Andrew Macnab and Mary Bennett, is entitled “Fridge Blindness: Selective lack of visible acuity in affiliation with a typical foraging behaviour”.
The researchers write that three male offspring, aged 9 to 14, of Bennett had been noticed to sporadically expertise a profound visible drawback – this situation being completely related to an incapacity to seek out stuff within the fridge. “Even with calm and constructive maternal encouragement and path,” they write, “the specified object usually would stay unseen till the mother-physician attended the fridge-side and bodily recognized the exact location of the merchandise. This behaviour was famous solely sporadically among the many feminine members of the family, however was unremitting among the many males.”
Regardless of an in depth on-line search, Cathrine was unable to provide you with any follow-up analysis. “I can’t assist however surprise if that’s as a result of male scientists fail to understand how vital and widespread this drawback is, or maybe as a result of they’re too busy rooting by means of the lab fridge looking for their lunch bag that, they swear, they put in there solely two hours in the past,” she writes. We couldn’t presumably remark – however we might welcome any additional reader insights into this or associated phenomena.
Eye for an eye fixed
He doesn’t say whether or not it was prompted by rootling in his fridge, however Jeroen Gildemacher in Groningen, the Netherlands, was lately reserving an appointment along with his optometrist on-line. He wonders aloud whether or not the pitfalls he encountered – unhealthy distinction, textual content extending rightwards past the sting of the web and so forth – had been on this case unhealthy design, or as an alternative intelligent advertising.
Primarily, although, he skilled a counterexample to the typically overbearing accuracy of GPS coordinates (21 August). On the finish of the method, below the heading “You will discover us right here”, he discovered a map 330 pixels broad – of the whole world.
It’s easy, Jeroen. That is an instance of the previous “for those who drown, you weren’t a witch” college of thought – if you will discover your technique to the optometrist, you don’t have to go to the optometrist.
Cats on the mind
“Talking of research that didn’t should be executed,” says a colleague – we weren’t, however we will, gladly – as they ahead on “Dreaming about cats: A web-based survey”, a brand new paper within the American Psychological Affiliation journal Dreaming.
The topline outcomes are that cat house owners dream extra about cats, that cats present up in about 5 per cent of remembered goals and that due to this fact, on this metric, they’re higher than canine. A small share of members indicated that they’d had destructive experiences with cats previously; “that is associated to the frequency of goals with threatening cats”, the researchers write. So now you realize.
Rod to your personal again
Additional to the UK’s back-to-the future re-embrace of imperial measurements (25 September), David Clark remembers that when the unique change to the metric metre/kilogram/second was mooted within the Seventies, somebody at his engineering faculty within the West Midlands instructed we should always transfer as an alternative to the rod-ton-fortnight system. They went so far as publishing a sequence of conversion tables, he says, exhibiting, for instance, that 30 miles an hour below the previous system equated to about 3.26 million rpf (rods per fortnight) within the new.
We word in passing that that is additionally the variety of mild years in a megaparsec, though we are going to go away it as an train for the reader to work out whether or not that’s a coincidence. “The preparation of the tables took a formidable quantity of effort as laptop time was fairly nicely unobtainable and digital calculators had been unavailable,” says David. We’re not sure whether or not we should always see this as a advantage. We’re additionally barely anxious that whoever it was may need received their mitts on the levers of energy within the meantime.
Whistle-blowers needed
An as-yet anonymous phenomenon is in proof in a paper from 2017 within the journal Nature Communications that Simon Goodman factors out to us. Alongside lead creator A. Sucker, additional authors embody a B. Actual and a energetic trio of Natalia Pieper, Mirko Trilling and Susanne Horn. We’d like to know what’s occurring there.
Dare not converse its title
Extra familiarly, you divulge to us that the CEO of Transparency Worldwide Australia is Serena Lillywhite, that Nick Fisch has been given a grant to attend the World Fisheries Congress and that the CEO of Epik, an organization that gives web providers to some ugly far-right teams, is Robert Monster. However let’s not go there.
Obtained a narrative for Suggestions?
Ship it to suggestions@newscientist.com or New Scientist, Northcliffe Home, 2 Derry Avenue, London W8 5TT
Consideration of things despatched within the submit will probably be delayed
You’ll be able to ship tales to Suggestions by e-mail at suggestions@newscientist.com. Please embody your own home tackle. This week’s and previous Feedbacks might be seen on our web site.
